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Comment by apowell | Hacker News Reader

I preferred thinking that the CAPTCHAs on my websites were doing a bit of good for the world - now I'm just facilitating free labor for Google's benefit.

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You're still getting free bot-prevention. If you don't like it, use something like Damien Katz's Negative CAPTCHA (hide a field with CSS, call it email, and wait for a bot to fill it out, and check that that field is empty server-side).

That's clever!

And completely unsustainable. It only takes a parser that checks if the field is visible. It's just a simple matter of adapting. reCAPTCHA is much harder to work around for a spammer.

Distinguishing humans from computers is an inherently unsustainable problem.

Yes. But it would be nice to have something that at least requires somewhat of a break-through instead of another afternoon of coding.

Absolutely. It only stops people who are half-heartedly malicious: bots stop and attackers get past either way. You now get the malicious uncoordinated person, but you also get a simpler code base and the peace of mind from knowing that your login system can't fail just because of a free third-party api.

Checking to see if the field is visible is an extremely difficult task. It should be hidden by CSS, so you would need to download all external style sheets and parse all inline and embedded styles. Same goes if the field is hidden by JavaScript, only it becomes much harder then. The only problem with this technique are dumb auto form-fillers.

Not that difficult. If you make your spambot a Firefox extension (for example) you get all that for free.

Currently, reCaptcha is digitizing old copies of the New York Times. I don't think that's changed.

No, but the deal was just announced today. I wonder if before long Google will use reCAPTCHA to digitize books as part of the Google books project - all without the permission of the original copyright owners.

Edit - To clarify, I think that making information in the public domain more accessible is a very worthwhile project.

All the new books are pretty high quality, compared to old printing techniques. There's a lot of valuable Public Domain data that we're all itching to have, and having Google be the source for that is a distinct possibility.

Well I think if anything that you are helping computers perform OCR better, which I would consider to be "doing a bit of good for the world", but I guess it depends on if you associate Google with "evil".

in what sense was it doing good? I dont think any of their current content has been seen by anyone much (It is old NYT's I think... so I dont know if they do it under contract for NYT?)

I remember reading at least a year after its introduction that nothing had been done with the OCR data it had produced to date.

It's only very recently that they started talking publicly about their relationship with the NYT, and they've still said diddly-squat about public availability of the results.

In my opinion, digitizing old books and newspapers is doing good for the world no matter who is profiting from it. The information will still be made publicly available on the internet, which it is not now. More information is a good thing.

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